this post was submitted on 04 Mar 2024
47 points (80.5% liked)
Privacy
31957 readers
534 users here now
A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.
Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.
In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.
Some Rules
- Posting a link to a website containing tracking isn't great, if contents of the website are behind a paywall maybe copy them into the post
- Don't promote proprietary software
- Try to keep things on topic
- If you have a question, please try searching for previous discussions, maybe it has already been answered
- Reposts are fine, but should have at least a couple of weeks in between so that the post can reach a new audience
- Be nice :)
Related communities
Chat rooms
-
[Matrix/Element]Dead
much thanks to @gary_host_laptop for the logo design :)
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
It's also an extension with 1 review, by a no-name developer, with only 12 installs... definitely would trust that...
Well this is 600 lines of code, if you cannot audit that you can indeed ignore it for now. Once again this is the only auditable code out there and not asking for unrelated permissions.
With all due respect, it doesnt matter what the code is right now. This is an extension that you can update at any point in the future to replace with something malicious.
Trust is near impossible to build in todays internet.
https://www.kaspersky.com.au/blog/dangerous-chrome-extensions-87-million/32170/
This is were the manifest/permission is important. I cannot emphasize enough that I had to code this myself because, at the time, nothing else would be OK with me. This was because of 1- way too big of a code base, 2- way too many permissions.
It is indeed a problem that extensions are not as well maintained as Linux distribution packages but in this specific instance the extension has no right to read any information nor send requests to any server.
I appreciate you have put effort into this, and you have gone out of your way to make it safer, but if the extension were to become malicious at a later date, expanding permissions (and relying on users brainlessly-clicking accept) or using an exploit or sidechannel would undo any of that.
The downside of browser extensions is that they are operating within a massive codebase, and thus have a huge attack surface if they decide to become malicious.
For what its worth, I commend your efforts here, its just near impossible to trust any peice of software not backed by the reputation of an established company/developer.